


in our bedroom after the war

by autoclaves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fix-It of Sorts, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of canon-typical violence, Post-Canon, it's the Ultimate Well-Earned Happy Ending, mods asleep post the forbidden happy ending, they saved the world & they're healing! jonny sims i can't hear you !!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24406501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: It’s like this: Jon’s skinny arms and missing ribs and the hunch of his shoulders, his careful worried mouth folded with laughter lines as he looks at Martin. It’s like this: Jon in the mornings, grinning, sleepy-eyed, wearing his clothes, loving him back. Saying, “Sleep well, beautiful?” like an old-worn habit.Martin hums low in his throat, and strokes back what he can reach of Jon’s hair. “Had a dream,” he admits.(Or: The world ends. The world doesn’t end. The world goes on with a bang and a whimper and they live. And Martin wakes up.)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 40
Kudos: 238





	in our bedroom after the war

**Author's Note:**

> i absolutely love that tma is a tragedy. i love how inevitable & looming it is & how it's been written into the very structure of the narrative. HOWEVER. due to personal reasons & for the purpose of this fic It Is No Longer A Tragedy! this is the forbidden & very much earned happy ending, fuck canon my city now, etc
> 
> some vague discussion of apocalypse-related trauma, mild (much milder than canon tbh) mentions of body horror, idk exactly what to warn for here because none of these things are explicit at all but lmk if you want it tagged/mentioned!
> 
> title: in our bedroom after the war by stars

“I love you,” Jon says. It’s the first thing he says after it all, gasping out of him all desperate and fearful, like he’s afraid it’ll be taken away as soon as he lets go. Like he’s afraid Martin will cringe back from him. “I love you, I love you, I’m sorry, I—Martin, God, you know I do, don’t you—” The words pour out of him in a rattling stream, but they’re his words. Jon’s voice, his eyes, his words.

Martin is still shaking. He can feel the tremors running through his hands, and he’s gulping in air, trying to steel his spine, but everything around them still smells like flames, like wasteland, and it just builds and builds inside him. It’s over now. It’s over, and he feels so fragile he might die. Fear has been his baseline for so long now that he doesn’t know what to do in its stark, echoing absence. 

“Let’s go home. Please. Home.” He reaches out a hand, a paling comparison to how Jon had brought him out of the Lonely all those months ago. Jon’s fingers burn hot and dry, incessantly shifting under Martin’s own, his skin still readjusting to the feeling of being itself. “I love you,” Martin says for good measure. It sounds like an afterthought; it’s anything but. “That stays the same, Jon.” 

“Home,” Jon repeats, distantly, mouth shaping around the word very deliberately. His body flickers. Bursts into disjointed static in the spasm of a second and then, just as quickly regains its shuddering corporeal form. Martin clings on to his hand as it jerks with the force of the change. 

“Did we do it? Did we finish it? Martin, Martin, did we end the—” 

The sky outside is smooth and pale with dawn, eyes blinking out like extinguished lanterns. Somewhere, a tape recorder cuts short its whirring lament. Somewhere, someone is living. Many someones. Enough, at least, to fill up the world they have stopped the destruction of. 

“No. No, I don’t think so,” Martin breathes; a skeletal exhale of a thing, a miracle in and of itself. “We _started_ it, Jon. We restarted the world.” 

The world ends. The world doesn’t end. The world goes on with a bang and a whimper and they live. 

And Martin wakes up. There’s light pouring onto his face, a warm, familiar weight indented around the sprawling curve of his back. He stays very, very still for a second, and waits for the irregular kicking of his heart to settle down. (He hasn’t dreamed about the end of the world in some time, much less the end of the end of the world. Those horrible final moments as the Eye seized up in death throes and Jon, its last unwilling keeper, followed it all the way into rigor mortis. All this to say neither of them dream much, these days. They both like it better that way.) 

There’s a touch on his arm, flutter-soft, then the pressure of a cheek leaning onto his shoulderblade. “Hey,” Jon murmurs. It comes out a little muffled, a little scratchy with sleep, and Martin loves him with something so big it hurts to draw back inside himself. 

“Hey, yourself,” he says, fighting back a smile. He’s sure it can be heard in his voice anyway. 

He turns onto his back so that he can see Jon properly, tucked close into his side and wearing one of Martin’s shirts, a soft long-sleeved one the color of the fields outside. It’s ridiculously big even for Martin, so on Jon the excess fabric puddles around his wrists and hangs off him in swatches of green. Martin draws him in and kisses him once, firmly. Jon is beautiful, always, but especially so in the mornings. The sun limns his dark skin with molten gold, and his scars are forgiving in this light. Reminders of survival rather than trauma. His buzzcut is growing out again—Martin can run his hands through it now, catching the short strands of black and silver between his fingers to tug gently, affectionately on them. 

It’s like this: Jon’s skinny arms and missing ribs and the hunch of his shoulders, his careful worried mouth folding with laughter lines as he looks at Martin. It’s like this: Jon in the mornings, grinning, sleepy-eyed, wearing his clothes, loving him back. Saying, “Sleep well, beautiful?” like an old-worn habit. 

Martin hums low in his throat, and strokes back what he can reach of Jon’s hair. “Had a dream,” he admits. 

Jon doesn’t ask about what. These days, there is only one dream they ever have on the rare occasions they do—all things circling back to it with the soft cushioning gauze of dream-logic, like variations on a theme. It is the only dream they can ever have, now. Some things are too beautiful, too terrible to tell in waking life. Some things change you too much to articulate. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” 

“When—or, after... After it all. You said you loved me. And you kept saying it, over and over,” Martin says slowly, “like you thought I was going to leave.” He aches all over, the memory of it brought to the forefront now. 

“I remember.” Jon puts a hand on Martin’s face, slowly runs a finger up and down the length of his cheek. “I thought I’d forgotten how to. Love you. When I was the Archivist.” 

They both understand that there had been no clear line between Jon and the Archivist—there are many things to be said about choices, and the making of them, and paths they inexorably set one on—but sometimes it’s easier to refer to them as if there was a distinction. 

“You still loved me, and he still loved me,” Martin says gently. Nowadays, with the apocalypse still running so fresh in their minds, that is the only thing left to reassure themselves with. Love, and the measure of it. Loss in the negative. 

Jon says he doesn’t remember much of what had happened. Martin does. He remembers that just for a second, in the middle of it all, the Archivist had looked at him. The Archivist had Looked at him, human and full of fear, and its Eyes flickered. And it had been the Archivist who looked away from him, too, two perfect trails of blood running down its cheeks as the static turned its malevolent attention elsewhere. Above them, the sky was still pulsing like a broken muscle. 

“Martin, I wasn’t... at the end, there, I thought I wouldn’t come back. The eyes, the light, the sky falling down—if I’d hurt you, if I couldn’t _feel_ anything about that because that part of me stopped caring—” He breaks off. “You would have been right to leave me,” he says, desperately. “I made you promise. That you’d leave, if I—” 

He had. The night before, Jon had made him swear he would leave, go somewhere safe, if he had to make the choice and the Archivist was the only one left afterwards. But Jon doesn’t remember looking away. Martin does. Martin thinks that even if the Archivist had indeed been separate from Jon entirely, it had still known him, with a lowercase _k._ Known that Jonathan Sims loved him, and acted accordingly. That, at least, meant something. Everything. 

“But you did come back. And I stayed.” That, too, means everything. Martin presses a kiss to his temple. There’s a scar there, right at the hairline where he’s pressing his lips. It’s a raised slash, and silvery with healing tissue—that eye had been one of the first to go, one of the first to blink out of Jon’s body and leave behind a cauterized, ragged tear already looking weeks old. 

“And we went home,” Jon finishes. That’s how every retelling of the dream ends, always. They make sure of it. 

Martin wraps steady arms around him with an intensity born of shared history. Their bedroom, their light, their painstaking effort at remaking a home; what is awful is behind them, and they get to rest now. Jon leans closer, gently pushes his head into the space under Martin’s chin like a particularly insistent cat. 

After a minute of this, Martin tells him as much. “You’re like a particularly insistent cat,” he says, running careful fingers into his short hair. 

Jon, predictably, does not like this. “You’re like a particularly horrible partner.” 

The top of his head, also predictably, nudges harder into Martin’s collarbone. Martin thinks this actively harms his case, but refrains from pointing it out. 

“If you say so.” 

“I do, actually. Should we make French toast for breakfast?” Jon kisses his throat and wiggles a little, an affectionate full-bodied thing. 

“I could eat, yeah.” 

So they make French toast. Jon dredges the bread and Martin fries, and the triangles turn out a little uneven, but still, the sun climbs steadily across unbroken sky and it’s more than either of them would have ever thought to ask for. In a moment of sheer desperation, Martin crowds Jon against the cool glass of their balcony door to kiss him. To press benevolent hands all over his beautiful, living body. Jon moves into the touches with a stiffness that they’ve learned will never go away, but what is important is that he moves. He breathes. (The war is gone, and they are still alive, both of them.) 

Martin brushes his lips over the biggest scar, right in the center of his throat. It’s as wide as about three of his fingers, an expanse of twisted skin mangling the thin, faded line that Daisy’s pocket knife had left behind. Jon shudders involuntarily. He’s twisting forward and then sideways, head dipping back, like he’s running from Martin’s touch and arching into it at the same time. 

“Does it hurt?” Martin asks. He moves away, and Jon shakes his head. His hands flutter to his throat, tapping over the edges of the mark in quick, erratic movements. 

“No, I just—it’s complicated.” He laughs, rueful. “I can’t help but hate it. And I can’t help but miss it. It doesn’t make sense, any of it.” 

“I know,” Martin says. He touches the mark with a fingertip, with the faintest pressure, and Jon’s hand meets his across that patch of warped skin. Slides between his fingers to hold it tight, knuckles bruising. 

“You make sense,” Jon says fiercely. “You make sense. The rest of the world will follow.” 

Martin drops his head onto his shoulder. His whole body is thrumming with it; the heady rush of loving and the yellow-blue of the horizon and the first notes of a song floating in from someone else’s radio. The rest of the world, following. Its pieces falling into place. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [@cartesianrift](http://cartesianrift.tumblr.com)


End file.
